  Letters Archive
Jumping the
Dragon Gate: Storytellers and the Creation of the
Shanghai Identity Laura A. McDaniel, assistant professor of
history, participates in the 1998/99 Fellows Program,
"Inventing Work. " She describes her current research
in the following article.
In 1875, a local Shanghai pictorial newspaper ran
an article about the prevalence of storytelling
beggars in the Chinese part of the city. The article
described these beggars in the following manner:
"These pitiful creatures are usually driven to this
lowly profession by disability, but this is not their
only problem. They are hungry and diseased, and most
of them are so filthy and covered with scabs that you
can't bear to look at them." Crowds of gawkers were
attracted to these beggars by lurid curiosity, and
once a sizeable number of people had gathered round,
the beggar would pull out a small stringed instrument
and sing a portion of a well-known epic tale. When he
had finished his tale, the beggar would walk around
to each of his listeners, holding out his cupped
hands to solicit donations.
This newspaper article and countless others like
it give us an indication of the abjectness of
storytellers in late imperial China. Virtual beggars
by trade, often driven to their profession by
disabilities, criminal records, or homelessness, they
faced perpetual poverty and discrimination. In the
official hierarchy of professions, storytellers
ranked even lower than prostitutes in terms of social
and political status. Their itinerancy made it
difficult for them to marry, settle down, or even
find a steady source of income; as a result, they
were considered threatening to the social order, and
they had little, if any, access to traditional
Chinese networks of support and control. They were
scorned by the state and by society as a whole, and
they had little recourse in the face of hardship.
Sixty years later, in 1936, the storyteller Xue
Xiaoqing found himself racing along Shanghai's
Bubbling Well Road in his shiny new Austin motorcar
and pulling to a stop outside the glamorous Ciro's
Dance Hall, where upwards of 500 fans awaited his
performance of the now-famous story "Fate in Tears
and Laughter." The son and grandson of storytellers
who had traveled an itinerant circuit and begged for
a living, Xue could certainly say that his profession
had undergone an enormous transformation since his
father had taken up storytelling forty years earlier.
The astonishing leap in social status among
Shanghai-era story tellers exemplified by Xue
Xiaoqing and many others is inextricably linked with
immigration to Shanghai, with the development of the
city of Shanghai itself, and with the emergence and
conscious creation of a modern urban identity
specifically associated with Shanghai. Historians of
China have long accepted the classification of all
urban immigration as "sojourning," under the
assumption that this kind of relocation did not
involve a fundamental change in identity. However, my
research on Shanghai-area storytellers indicates not
only that urban identities did exist, but that they
were an essential feature of the social mobility I
have just described. Until the late nineteenth century, Shanghai and
its surrounding hinterlands formed something of a
continuum. In terms of how this city figured in the
eyes of storytellers, Shanghai was just another
market town on the circuit traveled by itinerant
performers in Zhejiang and Jiangsu. Whether they were
in Shanghai or in a small village in rural Jiangsu,
storytellers tended during this period to give ad hoc
performances in abandoned temples, dilapidated tea
houses, temple fairs, and marketplaces, or simply on
street corners. By the 1930s, however, Shanghai had
undergone such a remarkable economic, architectural,
cultural, and technological transformation that it
dwarfed the other cities and towns in the region, and
provided storytellers with new physical and cultural
spaces in which to establish more respectable
reputations.
Shanghai's earliest storytelling venues, all
located in the oldest section of town (called the
"Chinese City"), were actually tea houses with the
bare minimum in terms of furnishings and amenities.
In this sense, performing at a teahouse in Shanghai
in the late nineteenth century was no different from
performing at a teahouse in any of the other cities
and towns in Zhejiang and Jiangsu at this time. It
was at the turn of the century that the storytelling
venues of Shanghai began to move into the more modern
"foreign concession" areas and to distinguish
themselves from the other storytelling venues in the
region. First, there was an explosion in terms of
numbers: the last thirty years of the nineteenth
century saw the rise of over seventy new storytelling
houses in greater Shanghai, and by the 1940s
Shanghai boasted over 500. Just in terms of
opportunities for storytellers to perform, Shanghai
quickly outstripped the other cities and towns in the
region. These new storytelling theaters were
important to the social mobility of story tellers in
other ways as well. They enabled storytellers to work
for fixed wages, rather than for the small donations
they received from open-air audiences, and this
helped to improve the lot and status of these
performers.
Between 1885 and 1900, the introduction of
electricity, running water, and multi-story
architecture set Shanghai's storytelling venues apart
from the more primitive establishments outside of the
city. Running water made for better tea and the
appearance of more modern public hygiene. Electricity
enabled storytelling house owners to light their
establishments well past sunset, thus introducing not
just the possibility for additional storytelling
performances every day, but also the whole concept of
Shanghai as the "city that never sleeps" (bu ye
cheng), and all of the powerful cultural
resonances that that entailed. In some of the
highest-level storytelling houses, electricity also
allowed for amenities like electric fans and even
primitive air conditioning, conveniences appreciated
by performers and their increasingly wealthy
clientele alike. These new technologies attracted
higher class patrons and justified the ad vent of
higher admission fees to storytelling houses; as a
result, storytellers working in these establishments
earned more money and enjoyed the increased prestige
associated with catering to high-class audiences.
Finally, advances in architecture allowed for the
appearance of immense storytelling theaters that
accommodated up to 500 people, as well as grandiose
five-to-ten-story entertainment houses where several
famous story tellers might perform simultaneously in
different rooms. Ultimately, performing in Shanghai's
foreign concession areas was simply considered more
comfortable, more profitable, and more prestigious.
"Of course I preferred working in the foreign
concessions," insisted one storyteller I interviewed.
"Storytelling houses in the foreign-concession areas
were just better than the ones outside of Shanghai or
in the Chinese City. Everything about them just
seemed cleaner, more elegant, more cultured. My
heavens, even the tea tasted better' The tea you got
in the Chinese City in those days was cloudy, and it
had a strange taste."
By the 1930s, Shanghai had come to represent the
pinnacle of the storytelling world, and only those
storytellers who were able to consistently find work
in the privileged urban spaces of Shanghai were
considered truly successful in this profession. The
storyteller Tang Gengliang phrased this situation in
the following way: "In the old days [i.e., before
1949], when you learned the storytelling art, first
you studied with your master, then you worked on your
own, traveling the itinerant circuit, and finally you
came to ShanghaiÑif you could do this, then it was a
sign that you had really perfected your art and had
become a star."
By the 1930s, the expression "jumping the dragon
gate" had entered into the lexicon of storytellers
and, indeed, into the popular imagination. To "jump
the dragon gate" (tiao long men) was, in the
jargon of storytellers, to land a job in one of the
storytelling venues of Shanghai's foreign
concessions. Storytellers had a particular fondness
for self-comparison to scholars, and so it is
interesting to note that this expression has its
origins in popular lore about the imperial
examination system. A popular Chinese proverb speaks
of the ability of a common carp to "jump the dragon
gate" and transform himself into a dragon (liyu
tiao long men) as an allegory for commoners who
succeed in the imperial examinations. To "jump the
dragon gate," then, was to catch the golden ring of
success and fame. For storytellers in the
Zhejiang-Jiangsu area, this could be achieved only in
Shanghai's foreign concessions.
Those storytellers who did "jump the dragon gate"
worked very hard to shore up their new found status
through affiliation with highly territorial
storytellers' guilds. These guilds emerged at the
turn of the century as one of the most important
factors in creating a class of "professional, elite,
well paid storytellers with clear urban affiliations
and in distinguishing this group from their
untrained, poor, itinerant, rural based counterparts.
The distinction between guild "insiders" and
"outsiders" was starkly apparent to performers and
spectators alike in the storytelling world.
Guild affiliation gave a select group of
storytellers exclusive access to jobs in the
highest-paying, most prestigious storytelling houses.
Guild leaders paid heavy dues to storytelling-house
owners in order to lay claim to these establishments,
and these monopolies were reinforced with bribes,
extortion, and physical violence. The simple truth is
that if you were not a member of one of two
storytellers' guilds in Republican-era Shanghai, you
had no chance of finding employment in any of
Shanghai's 500-plus storytelling houses.
One gained entrée into a reputable storytellers'
guild by completing a long apprenticeship with a
senior member of that guild. But in order to promote
the impression that storytelling was a
professionalized, elite line of work that was not
open to street riff-raff, many storytelling masters
made a show of being exceedingly choosy about
potential students. What seems to be the case is that
every storyteller who attained any degree of fame in
late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Shanghai
became apprenticed to his or her teacher through
connections with friends or family. The hearty
disapproval of "outsiders" to this system is evident
from an article that appeared in a storytelling
newspaper called Robinson in 1943. The author
of this article complained that the storyteller Xu
Hansheng randomly accepted untrained itinerant
storytellers as his "apprentices" in exchange for
payment, and allowed them to advertise them selves as
his students (and thus as guild members) without
actually giving them any training. Most successful
storytellers frowned upon such practices, in large
part because they deprived Shanghai's storytelling
guilds of the financial rewards and quality-control
privileges inherent in the apprentice ship system.
"If Zhao is allowed to continue operating this way,"
warns the author, "then any old country bumpkin can
become a [guild] member, and the quality of the
storytelling profession in this area will sink
considerably. [Zhaos Guild] should seriously consider
throwing him out!" The author's distress over the
desegregation of the storytelling profession is
amusing, however, because the majority of
Shanghai-area storytellers were not originally from
Shanghai and thus overwhelmingly qualified as
"country bumpkins" themselves in a geographic sense.
What saved bona fide guild members from being labeled
as "country bumpkins" was that they submitted to a
training process meant to cleanse them of their
peasant habits and school them in the intricacies of
elegant, educated-looking comportment. The implicit
argument here is that the difference between city
people and their country cousins is one of
refinement, culture, education, and class.
One aspect of maintaining this refined, cultured,
"urban" image was refraining from spitting and
clearing one's throat in public. While such habits
were tolerated among itinerants and people who
performed in the dingy teahouses outside of Shanghai,
they were frowned upon in the elegant new
storytelling avenues of the foreign concessions. In
1933 a Shanghai based storytelling afficionado wrote
to one of the dozens of storytelling fan newspapers
in Shanghai to complain about the standards of
comportment and performance among storytellers in a
small town outside of Shanghai, where he had just
made a business trip the previous week. "Performers
and audience members alike cleared their throats and
spat incessantly," he lamented. "I was disgusted and
embarrassed to be in such an uncultured place, and I
couldn't wait to get back to [Shanghai], where people
are more refined."
The professional boundaries between
guild-affiliated storytellers and their untrained,
itinerant counterparts coincided with (and even
contributed to) the emerging distinctions between
rural and urban people in general in Shanghai. Beyond
the great efforts they made to monopolize Shanghai in
terms of employment opportunities, storytellers
further demarcated the distinction between "urban"
and "rural" people by playing on this dichotomy in
the content of their stories. The image of Shanghai
that appeared in the stories and songs of most
storytellers in this region was one of opulence and
modernity, as in the following song by Wang Gengxiang:
The ten-li foreign enclave is extravagant, The stereotypical Shanghainese man brought to life
in the stories of the 1930s and 1940s was wealthy,
modern, fashionable, and heavily influenced by
foreign trends. He usually owned an auto mobile,
which could be used at a moment's notice for a quick
shop ping spree on Nanjing Road (the main
thoroughfare). He lived in an opulent foreign-style
mansion and dined on delicacies every day, and his
wives and daughters paraded up and down the wide
avenues of Shanghai's foreign concessions dressed in
the latest fashions, their high heels making
distinctive clicking sounds on the pavement and the
smell of expensive perfume wafting through the air
behind them.
Of course, such images were far from being
descriptive of the reality that everyone experienced
in Shanghai, but they were presented to the listener
as a Chinese version of the "American dream,"
qualities to aim for or even qualities that might rub
off on them if they stayed in Shanghai long enough.
Storytellers represented the Shanghai identity to
their listeners as a natural object of envy for all
those who lived outside of Shanghai, but also as
something that was within reach for newcomers to the
city. One of the most amusing stories that promoted
the Shanghai identity as glamorous but within the
grasp of the "little people" was the story of "The
Little Nun Who Came Down the Mountain," by Zhu
Yaoxiang and Zhao Jia4iu. The story of the little
Buddhist nun who abandoned life at her convent on the
hill to indulge her desire for sex had been a popular
and well-known one for years. But Zhu and Zhao gave
this story a new twist: in their version of the
story, the little nun is overcome not by sexual
desire but by a yearning to shop and to be like
Shanghai's "modern girls." "Where can I indulge my
desire to wear powder and blusher?" the little nun
wonders. "Where can I adorn myself in silk and satin?
The more I think about it," she sighs, "the more my
heart aches!" In the end, the little nun leaves her
convent and comes to Shanghai to indulge herself in
makeup and expensive clothes. Incidentally, she also
finds herself a husband there.
Another way in which the con tent of these stories
helped to create the Shanghai identity was by
explicitly defining what it meant to be
"not-Shanghainese." In the world of late
Republican-period Shanghai, the polar opposite of the
Shanghai dweller was the country bumpkin from
Jiangbei (a rural region to the north of Shanghai).
If the Shanghainese were the quintessential modern
success story for Jiangsu, then Jiangbei migrants
were at the opposite end of the spectrum, the
ultimate self-delusional losers. The caricature of
the Jiangbei migrant was, of course, just as much an
invention as the Shanghai dweller; but its existence
helped to reinforce popular faith in the Shanghai
identity.
The Jiangbei migrant became the "Other" against
which the Shanghai elite defined its own identity.
The Jiangbei migrant who appeared in the songs and
stories of Shanghai's early twentieth-century
storytellers was basically a buffoon. In contrast to
the elite Shanghai dweller, dressed to the nines in
the latest fashions, the Jiangbei migrant of popular
songs and stories was inevitably shabbily dressed in
clothing that identified him as a country bumpkin,
and these modest clothes were often disheveled or
covered with dirt. While the Shanghainese usually
appeared in these stories and songs as real estate
tycoons and ladies of leisure, Jiangbei migrants were
most often incarnated as rickshaw pullers and coolies
(two of the lowest professions in Republican-era
Shanghai). While the typical Shanghai urban ite was
savvy and sophisticated, the Jiangbei migrant was
always a bungling fool, and this was often
accentuated in popular stories by making the Jiangbei
migrant not just stupid, but deluded about his own
intelligence. The storyteller Yao Yinmei recalls,
"All I had to do was say a few words in Jiangbei
dialect [to indicate a Jiangbei character], and the
audience would burst out laughing. It's not that what
I had said was particularly funny, but they were
laughing in anticipation of the stupid things this
Jiangbei character was bound to
do."
The link between the social mobility of
storytellers and their invention and embrace of the
Shanghai identity is a unique but important one. In
the mid-nineteenth century, storytellers in Jiangsu
and Zhejiang found themselves literally at the bottom
of the social heap, without even a home to call their
own. It was precisely at this time that Shanghai
began to expand and improve, and it was this growth
in Shanghai that created new possibilities for
mobility among storytellers. Not only could these
previously dispossessed people find steady and
gainful employment in Shanghai; but as Shanghai's
cityscape began to boast unique and more "modern"
things like plumbing, electricity, and opulent
interior decorating, residents of this city took
pride in these improvements-and the storytellers who
were lucky enough to work in these new establishments
at the time found themselves perfectly positioned to
lay claim to this new territory and this new,
"modern," "urban" identity. These storytellers
enhanced the glamour of this urban identity and
widened the imagined cultural barrier between
urbanites and rural people with the content of their
stories. They shored up this claim to an "urban"
identity for themselves with the help of elaborate
rules and institutional structures, so that these
"urban storytellers" became an exclusive club to
which rural outsiders simply were not admitted. Urban
identities were so strong among Shanghai storytellers
be cause Shanghai was literally what made them who
they were-before the glitz, wealth, and expansion
that characterized Shanghai in the 1930s and 1940s,
storytellers were "nobodies." Shanghai was what made
them "somebodies."
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